IDEOLOGIES: The Consolations of Philosophy

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"General Diffuseness." Deeply distressed was the congress' chairman, Amsterdam's shaggy-haired Hugo Pos. After two years in Buchenwald he had dropped his absent-minded-professor manner and set forth on a crusade for "scientific" philosophy which he thought would give the world a new, better life. "The discussions," Pos sighed last week, "revealed the general diffuseness of postwar thinking."

How much truth the philosophers had amassed was perhaps best revealed by a little man who rose from the back rows and asked permission to speak. After several minutes his learned listeners still understood nothing of his polysyllabic lecture. At length he went to the blackboard and drew a series of complicated equations (which Expert Russell later pronounced nonsense). Then the little man smiled and said softly: "And this, gentlemen, solves the problem of the world."

Then he tripped down from the platform and was never heard of again. What he wrote on the blackboard was erased and nobody had copied it down.*